Thread by @DmitryOpines

1/ So, I was a vicious online gaming troll.

Years ago (but not enough years to be exculpatory) I said horrific things to people online.

I'm hoping this comes as a surprise to some of you, and wanted to talk about it a bit.

If you only follow me for tariff takes, plz skip.

2/ I got started trolling while playing a team game online with friends.

The game (DotA) was the precursor of modern phenomenon "League of Legends"

It's a 5v5 game, takes about 25-50 minutes to play and in it poor play not only weakens you, but strengthens the other team.

3/ So if you and two of your friends start a game, the two random strangers assigned to fill out your team of five significantly determine your enjoyment for most of the next hour.

If someone on your team plays badly, trash talking becomes the game.

4/ My friends and I were reasonably quick witted, had decent vocabularies and typed quickly. We were also on a voice call together, egging each other on.

Trash talking became both a way of blowing off steam and a game of one upsmanahip.

The more absurdly offensive, the better.

5/ We justified it to ourselves by saying that we didn't actually mean any of it, and that the lines were so over the top as to be essentially ironic.

This is not too dissimilar from what 4chan users will say about their Nazi or racist content.

Bullshit.

6/ We were earning social validation points from our peers by making the internet a shittier place for others.

We were being monsters for the applause.

7/ We justified it by pointing to the prevelance of trash talk in the gaming community.

We weren't creating toxicity, we were just winning it.

Bullshit.

8/ There was no opt-in or opt-out system for being verbally abused, and the awfulness of some does not define the rules for all.

9/ The lack of moderation or policing was a contributing factor, but not I believe a defining one.

Its not the presence of the occasional police officer which dissuades me from public urination, but a sense of norms and decency.

10/ That those I was insulting were faceless, identity-less anonymous strangers obscured behind gamer tags only made it easier to treat them as targets instead of people.

I will never know how much damage my words did. If I caused tears, I never had to watch them roll down.

10/ Looking back, so much of what I justified as normal, ironic, "an exercise in joke construction," or unimportant, was an unpopular young man getting plaudits and attention for tearing others down.

I have to live with that and I am unbelievably sorry.

/Thread